Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Hearing Things.
In Hearing Things, Leigh Eric Schmidt writes a history of how listening changed during the American Enlightenment. Schmidt takes issue with Ong’s hard-and-fast opposition between oral and literate cultures while maintaining that the Enlightenment changed the way the West hears. While Schmidt follows Ong in approaching the “question of secularization” through the “cultural history of the senses” (7), he writes a “grittier” (8) history, one not locked into a pre- and post-Gutenberg framework. He wants to amend Ong’s characterization of the modern era as one of “hearing loss” by instead following how hearing and orality changed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, how the ear was “educated, entertained, enlightened” (81). He, for example, sees the Methodism of eighteenth-century America— a sect with ears attune to religious “calling,” to thunderous pronouncements of divine judgment, and to noisy revivals—as an exception to Ong’s generalization of a post-Gutenberg loss of (spiritual) hearing. Schmidt does identify, however, an “Enlightenment acoustics of demystification” (1) in the sound technologies, entertainment practices, and medical pathology of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century United States. Experiences of “hearing things” divine or spiritual, Schmidt argues, were increasingly “nullified as hallucinations” (9) and deemed pathological or illusory. In his final chapter, however, on Emanuel Swedenborg and nineteenth-century Spiritualism, Schmidt reminds his readers that the American Enlightenment’s education of the ear didn’t stop people from trying to contact “voices from the Spirit-Land” (199).
While this book is a history of sound and American religion, many of Schmidt’s observations hold true for England as well. For example, Swedenborg and Spiritualism were popular and influential in mid-Victorian Britain, and many authors (like EBB) were enthusiastic readers of Swedenborg. Schmidt’s nuanced narrative of sound and spirituality, then, will help contextualize certain practices of reading the Bible aloud. That being said, I do think that Schmidt exaggerates the nineteenth century’s aural skepticism. This is especially true when it comes to the phonograph. Schmidt, like Sterne and others, portrays the phonograph as a technology that evacuated presence from the voice and demystified source-less sound. This is very true for early-twentieth-century users, as evidenced by depictions of the machine by Joyce, Woolf, and other modernists. As John Picker has argued, however, late Victorians considered the phonograph miraculous, a machine that preserved presence and flouted death.
